It's not hard to understand why-this is an application designed with the user in mind.Įvery Slack team has a General channel intended for the entire company, but the bulk of day-to-day chatter happens in channels related to a specific team or project. Slack launched in 2013 and quickly came to define the team chat space, in no small part because people loved using it. Note that we focused exclusively on apps built for real-time communication, and de-emphasized tools that focus mostly on project management. The apps below are, in our opinion, the ones that offer the best balance of these five things. And there should be integrations with other apps, to make getting work done easier. Sharing a file should be as easy as clicking-and-dragging. You're here to work, and the ideal team chat apps make this easy with collaboration-specific features. There should be keyboard shortcuts on the desktop, gestures on mobile, and other ways to quickly move from channel to channel.Įnable collaboration. User interfaces need to be clear, without unnecessary clutter. Members need to be able to navigate the various conversations quickly. The best team chat apps offer voice and video communication, and also offer some way for users to share their screen for collaboration.Īre easy to navigate and control. Some conversations are smoother out loud. Filtering features make this a lot easier. Your team should be able to quickly find past conversations for relevant information. There is nothing more frustrating than having the same conversation multiple times, which is why search is essential.

Offer universal search with filtering features. The ability to tag people and to pull them into conversations they otherwise might miss is also a must. Ideally conversations can be broken down even further than that, using threads or similar features to keep people from talking over each other. This means channels that team members can join, or not join, depending on what's relevant to them. The best team chat apps organize conversations in a way that enables this, allowing users to decide what they do and don't see. Some messages need to be seen by your entire company, others need to happen at the team level, and not every team conversation needs to involve your entire team.

We think a few features are universally necessary, however, and kept them in mind while we were reviewing apps. Google Chat for Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) usersĬommunication is tied to culture, and every company is different-this is why there are so many work chat apps on the market. Microsoft Teams for large organizations broken down into teams You can read more about setting up Zaps here. To get started with a Zap template, just click on it, and we'll guide you through setting it up. Zapier's automations are called Zaps, and you'll see several Zap templates-our pre-made Zap workflows-throughout this piece. This piece also includes some ways that you can use Zapier to do more with your chat app, like get reports of key info delivered to a specific channel or receive notifications before events like meetings.

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